Well after a week of non stop work we finally have a working draft of our story board and anamatic.

Originally the idea was to create a trailer, however during the pre production stage we quickly realised our idea wouldnt work very well as a stand alone piece. In the end the trailer came out to almost 100 shots.

This was down to a few reasons.

1) as we are creating a stereoscopic short, the idea of having quick paced shots at around half a second wouldnt work well and would be to quick to view the stereoscopics in detail. This would cause us to fall into using stereoscopics as a gimmick rather than a story telling device.

2) the shear amount of shots we would have to complete would be to much for the time we have, meaning we would have to sacrafice quality for quantity, which we dont want.

3) we also felt alot of the shots were to cliche, we want to create something beautiful and unique, experimenting with different styles of cinematography, than to the usual scenes you see in an alien invasion trailer.

4)we also want to enter this into film festivals which might be a problem creating a trailer for something that doesnt exist.

Keeping all this in mind Liam and I created a new storyboard and script.

We felt that we needed to bring the idea into a short and refine it. We wanted t okeep bringing the story back to the main character to link it all together.

Any way you can check it out for your self.

Here is the storyboard.

and here is the animatic.

We are going to wait for some feedback on what we have so far as we feel we could add some tweaks and maybe an extra scene.

Now we are well on our way with the final major project, as Luke, Liam and I are not that good at drawing we have bought Thomas Spettel and Gaz On board to help us with concept art, with Gaz working on the characters, mainly Bonnie Dale and Carson whilst Tom develops the aliens.

He are some of the concept art that Gaz has done.

Carson

Dale

Bonnie

And some of the alien designs Tom has been working on.

Currently I am working non stop on getting the story board complete and designing any extra shots we need ready to build an animatic.

We are waiting on a rough sound score for the film and in the process of getting an actor to come down to record the monologue.

So before I get on with blogging the progress of our film, I thought I would give you a bit of information regarding what it is we are trying to create.

We are going to produce a short 2 minute stereoscopic film, in the format of a trailer entitled above. The reason we are producing a trailer is simple, we only have less than a year to make the film so we want to produce the best shots possible and the story is to ambitious to display in a two minute short.

The backstory goes, something like this…

1959, without warning, the world is ambushed by an alien attack, first destroying the valuble resorces such as oi rigs, then by destroying the last remaining ties of government we had left and cutting off all communications between countries. Humanity was left helpless and after years of war, on the scale no one had seen before, civilisation is left in ruins. Only one choice remained, to try rebuild civilisation underground and leave the surface.

Present time, whilst the surface is alive with the alien inhabitants living among the desolate wastelands of 50’s America, the new underground civilisation built by the remaining survivors is now a thriving web of vibrant cities and shanty slumbs, in which some of the most corrupt, lawless and savage people dwell, where battering and trading have replaced all forms of currency.

Our story follows the relationships and struggles between the three characters on their journey from settlement to settlement to form a revolution for one last fight against the aliens.

Our three main characters are.

Carson

Carson had a tough childhood, living on the family ranch his whole life. He never went to school and instead was brought up in a very western environment, shooting, wrangling, riding, making tools and engineering became a second nature to him. He had no friends other then his brother.
The invasion hit when he was 25 and his family were killed but Carson survived.

He is a tough old man who has survived on his own, venturing to the alien infested land above to get supplies and weapons, he is one of the few known to make it back alive.

He found a 5 year old Dale living in the slums, stealing and robbing people to stay alive. After a failed attempt at robbing Carson, Carson took him in and trained him to survive.

Without the family or home he has known all his life he began travelling the slums looking for people to join his revolution. He has become somewhat of a legend throughout the underground city’s and his tales from his travels above have become folk law.

Dale.

Dale was born a couple of years after the invasion in the underground city’s. He was abandoned by his mother when he was 3 and survived by living off scraps of food until he was able to steal. By the age of 5 he was robbing civilians and stealing anything he could.

One day when Carson was walking through a dark alley he got jumped by Dale. At first he thought it was a joke but then he saw the look in his eyes, no hope, nothing to loose. He tried to reason with Dale but in the end had to disarm him. When Dale came to he was in Carsons house.

Dale stayed with Carson who trained him to survive the harsh environments of both the aliens above and the cutthroat city’s below. He made regular trips to the surface from a young age and his upbringing has left him fearless.

He has become a master in both hand to hand combat and weapons. His natural big size means that he is extremely strong often using just his fists, equipped with his trademark knuckle dusters, to pummel an alien to death.

Bonnie.

Bonnie was born in the underground city’s. She never knew her mother as her father had killed her when bonnie was young. Her father was the ring leader to an organised crime syndicate. Profiting off the invasion and other people’s misery.

Bonnie was brought up around crime and knew what her cater was doing from a very young age. Even though her father tried to push her into the life of crime she always refused. Until she ran away when she was 15.

Living on her own she had to adapt to survive. Used to having everything handed to her she soon realised the harsh reality of living in the slums. Times got tough and she vowed never to steal from the innocent people forced this life, instead she turned to robbing the criminals in the lawless towns.

She meets Carson and Dale when she is above gathering food. She was surrounded and gets saved by them. From then she joins there group and their quest for a mass revolt against the aliens.

Our trailer will follow a monologue read by Carson sitting in an abandoned bar on the surface.

The monologue is almost finished, however it could do with a bit of pruning.

This is what we have so far.

‘”Where were you when they came?” That’s the question they always ask…’

Those of us who are still left remember. That moment. That exact moment, where our dull, pointless lives got thrown into something none of us were ready for.

Strange isn’t it?

Now the past is like a dream. Like a life I never had. Never will have, and as the world looked up… everything changed.

So our major project ‘Above’ is underway and we have hit the ground running, working all day everyday so far. Currently we our in the pre production stage, building the script, working on characters Ect.

In our film there will be three main characters it focuses on, I have been working on Carson (a tough old man).For this we wanted a westerny looking character with loads of wrinkles, but he still had to look tough.

Here is an idea of whatwe our aiming for.

We trying to locate some people to work on the character development, as I can’t draw very well but here are some of my character designs.